Cross
Currents No 16 July 2003
A
digest of cross sectoral information management events, issues and ideas in
organisations, libraries, archives and museums, with special emphasis on
arts and the humanities.
Australian Computing Arts Conference
The
Australian e-Humanities Network and University of Newcastle will present the
next Australian Computing Arts Conference at the Centre for Literary and
Linguistic Computing, University of Newcastle, Australia, 7-9 July 2004, on
the themes e-humanities and the disciplines, online knowledge gateways
and new media. It will overlap and involve joint sessions with the Australian
Historical Association annual meeting 5-9 July. Invited speakers include Dr
Willard McCarty (Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College
London) and Dr Jock Phillips, (General Editor, Encyclopedia of New Zealand
project). Enquiries: Hugh Craig (02) 49215175, hugh.craig@newcastle.edu.au
Web: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/centre/cllc/
[Source Australian e-Humanities Network].
Canadian
research dissemination
A
group of researchers from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries,
l'Université de Montréal, and University of Western Ontario have launched a
two-year study of knowledge dissemination in Canada. The investigators,
William Birdsall, Jean-Claude Guédon and Robert Babe, along with a team of
collaborators and partners, including the Canada Institute for Scientific and
Technical Information, Canadian National Site Licensing Project, Dalhousie
University, and National Library of Canada, will examine the current system
for disseminating research knowledge and identify whether Canada needs a
national research strategy in this area. The study is funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Association of
Research Libraries. Web: www.kdstudy.ca [Source: FOS]
Cultural Commons
The
Center for Arts and Culture in the United States has launched Cultural
Commons, a website designed to serve those interested in art, culture and
public policy. Membership is free and open to all.
Features include: daily headlines of major news stories, a weekly news
digest, a calendar of
conferences, meetings, workshops and other events, opinion pieces on
art, culture and policy, a discussion forum, announcements, a directory of
experts on particular issues and a job announcements section. Web:
http://www.culturalcommons.org
[Source Culpol]
Cultural Industries
A
UNESCO meeting on the International Creative Sector, held in Austin, Texas,
5-7 June 2003, considered: how cultural industries are defined -- their
scope, employment, and economic consequences; policies that have emerged from
studying the cultural sector; audiences and patterns of participation and
consumption; differences between non-profit and commercial enterprises;
different approaches to policies and methods across the countries represented.
A conference website created by co-sponsor University of Texas, Austin,
provides further conference details as well as an extensive reading
list on the creative sector. http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/unesco/index.html,
[Source: Culpol]
Digital Research and Scholarship in the
Humanities
Envisaging
the Future is the name of a symposium on digital research and scholarship in
the humanities held at the Humanities Research Centre, Old Canberra House,
Australian National University 22-23 July 2003. Speakers included: Mark
Kornbluh (Director of the US National Gallery of the Spoken Word Project),
Jane Hunter (Distributed Systems Technology Centre), Marie-Louise Ayres
(National Library of Australia), Phil Graham (Centre for Social Research in
Communication University of Queensland), Chris Blackall (Centre for
Cross-Cultural Research). [Source:
Australian e-Humanities Network]. Web:
http://online.anu.edu.au/HRC/activities/conferences_2003/index.html
Music
resources in the UK
The
International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation
Centres UK & Ireland has launched the Cecilia online database, containing
information on collections of music materials of all kinds held in libraries,
archives, museums and other repositories in the UK and Ireland. The project,
demonstrating the benefits of a cross-sectoral approach to information
provision in music, is administered by the IAML UK and Ireland Branch with
funding from the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme, The
Research Support Libraries Programme, Resource (The Council for Museums,
Archives and Libraries), and The Music Libraries Trust. Web: http://www.cecilia-uk.org
[Source IAML]
Scholar-Based
Innovations in Publishing
Gerry
McKiernan’s three part article on scholar-based Innovations, originally
published in Library Hi Tech News (Vol 20 nos 2-3 and 5, March-April, June
2003) as Part I (Individual and Institutional Initiatives), Part II (Library
and Professional Initiatives) and Part III (Organizational and National
Initiatives) is also available at
[Source: FOS]: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ScholarBased-I.pdf;
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ScholarBased-II.pdf;
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ScholarBased-III.pdf.
Visual arts resources in the UK
The
Visual Arts Data Service has launched Fineart, a new online resource of art
works selected from the Council for National Academic Awards Collection and
from the collections of some of the UK’s finest art colleges and
universities. The new web-based collection is dedicated to work by staff,
students and other alumnus of UK higher education institutions that have made
a significant contribution to higher education fine art practice. Web: http://fineart.ac.uk
[Source: AHDS]
AMICO and Artstor
The
Art Museum Image Consortium (Amico) Library, an Internet archive with digital
copies of more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, and photographs, created
through a collaboration of 39 museums, will merge Artstor .Web: http://www.amico.org
and http://www.artstor.org. [Source: New
York Times 22 May 2003].
Australian Arts and Science Collaboration
The
Australia Council and the Australian Research Council have launched a joint
effort to showcase cross-government collaboration between the arts and science
and highlight the potential for scientists and artists to enhance each
others’ research. The projects are Auto Nomad: A location-based handheld
audio device for sound-art applications and Fish-Bird: Autonomous
interaction in a contemporary arts setting. The projects were
selected through a
national competition by the Australia Council’s New Media Arts
program, Synapse, and the ARC’s Linkage-Projects program.
According to the press release: ‘The media and creative industries are among
the fastest growing sectors of the new economy. In Australia, the creative
industries have been valued at $25 billion a year – as much as the
residential construction industry – or 3.3% of GDP. Creative industries
employ 350,000 people and, at 2.7% per annum, growth in employment in creative
industries outstrips the national average of 2.0%. By adopting a ‘whole of
government’ approach, the Australia Council and the Australian Research
Council (ARC) will bring together innovators from diverse fields, make new
connections and progress the national innovation agenda”. Web: http://www.ozco.gov.au
Australian
Film Commission and ScreenSound Australia
The merger of the Australian Film Commission
and ScreenSound Australia is underway following the passing of the Australian
Film Commission Amendment Bill 2003 in June 2003. The debate in the Australian
Parliament covered the following issues: the joining of two different cultures
and sets of employment conditions; the continuing professional independence
and accountability of the Archive; the future name of the Archive and its
continuing separate identity; the secrecy, logic and motivation behind the
bill; the creation of a statutory base for the national collection. Web: www.aph.gov.au
[Hansard section]. [Source aus-archivists].
Consortia
Resource
Sharing & Information Networks, volume 16 no 1 2002, devoted to the theme
Cooperative Efforts of Libraries, has the following articles: Dottie Hiebing
and Timothy Johnson on METRO and OCLC: Implementing Virtual Reference in a
Multi-Type Consortium (p 7-19) and Jackie Shieh, Ed Summers and Elaine Day
on A Consortial Approach to Cooperative Cataloging and Authority Control:
The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) Experience (p 33-52). Web:
Resources Sharing & Information Networks via http://www.haworthpressinc.com/.
[Source: Erik Arfeuille via FOS]
Libraries, archives, museums, galleries and
broadcasters
The Australian Society of Archivists is holding
a national conference in Adelaide, South Australia, in September 2003 on the
theme, GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), to highlight the
similarity of issues between the cultural endeavours at a time of increasing
pressure on collection amalgamations. Presentations include: GLAM As Seen by
Government (Margaret Sears); State of the Nation for GLAM (Michael McKernan);
GLAM professional – Are We One Profession Under the Skin (Kerrie Round and
David Roberts); Implementing GLAM Programs Within Organisations Which Are
themselves Not Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (Gail Greenwood,
Phil Reed and Jenny Timms). Web: http://www.archivists.org.au/. [Source aus-archivists].
Robert
T. Coonrod, President and Chief Executive of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, in First Monday 23 April 2003, speaks about the common
problems and common interests of museums, libraries, and broadcasters in the
digital age. ‘As we become more like museums and libraries, we also face
similar challenges maintaining and managing our collections.’
Broadcasters with limited budgets will have to ‘make judgments about
the scholarly, historical cultural, strategic or financial significance of our
content. - just like libraries and museums do’. Web: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_5/coonrod/index.html
[Source: First Monday]
Collecting,
Connecting and Creating Knowledge: Libraries, Archives and Research in the 21st
Century is the name of a conference organised by the Friends of the Turnbull
Library and the Humanities Society of New Zealand, 20-23 June 2003 in
Wellington, New Zealand. The conference explores libraries, archives and
research in the multiple contexts of national, university, specialist and
public libraries and archives, new and old media, and the changing environment
for research and new knowledge creation, especially in the humanities and
arts. Exploring the topic will require assessing the principal changes
occurring in the conception and functions of information repositories and the
different ways in which research can be understood as a characteristic of the
knowledge society. Speakers include Dr Charles Henry (President of NINCH, the
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage in the USA). Program: http://www/humanz.org.nz
[Source NINCH-Announce]
Digital Library Research
The
National Science Foundation and DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital
Libraries have sponsored a new series of working groups to produce reports on
a range of projects including reference models for digital libraries, digital
imagery for cultural and historical material, spoken-word audio collections
and personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. Web: http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/intl.hmtl.
[Source: CNI]
The
Price of Digitisation
A
report by Lorna Hughes on the NINCH/Innodata Symposium, The Price of
Digitization: New Cost Models for Cultural and Educational Institutions,
hosted by the New York Public Library and co-sponsored by the NYPL and New
York University is now available from NINCH. Areas covered: the difference
between cost, price and value; cost barriers (workflow and technology;
intellectual property and institutional costs and variables); comparative
costs of analogue and digital preservation; the emergence of digitisation as a
core budget item rather than a project cost in institutional budgets;
budgeting for digitisation (typically including 1/3 on
digitisation; 1/3 on cataloguing, description and indexing; and 1/3 on
administrative costs, quality control and overhead); revenue generation and
funding models; sustaining projects. Innodata President, Jack Abuhoff,
summarised the key points emerging from the conference as: critical document
analysis and workflow design, clearly defined project goals, thinking through
future needs - emphasised that digitisation is a highly complex activity and
should not be approached lightly. Web: http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report
[Source: NINCH-Announce]
INFORMATION
AUDITING
Hanneri
Botha and JA Boon’s The Information Audit: Principles and Guidelines, in
LIBRI: International Journal of Libraries and Information, vol 53, no 1 2003
(pp23-38) reviews the types of audits in the commercial world, including
audits of information resources. According to the authors, there is no single,
accepted methodology for performing an information audit. After looking at a
number of audit types including financial audits, communication audits and
various information audit methodologies, they conclude that, even though the
principles of the financial audit cannot be used to develop a standardised
methodology for information auditing, information professionals can look
towards the accounting profession for support in developing a standardised,
universally accepted method for accurately determining the value of
information entities. Guidelines for a standardised information audit
methodology are given. Web: http://www.saur.de
[Source: FOS]
The
existence or absence of information black holes created by the networked world
was queried by the Wolanski Foundation in its submission to the Senate Inquiry
into the Role of Libraries in the Online Environment and at the Inquiry’s
Sydney hearings in May 2003 (see submissions on Senate committee pages,
Australian Parliament House website http://www.aph.gov.au).
Fred
Kaplan, in his short article, The
End of History: How
E-mail is Wrecking Our National Archive (Slate
4
June 2003), lends support to this notion in drawing on the experience of Cold
War historian Eduard Mark. “When tomorrow's historians go to write the
chronicles of decision-making that led to Gulf War II, they may be startled to
find there's not much history to be written. The same is true of Clinton's war
over Kosovo, Bush Sr.'s Desert Storm, and a host of other major episodes of US
national security policy. Many of the kinds of documents that historians of
prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes,
and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and
defence or among colonels and generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—simply
no longer exist”. The use of PowerPoint for military presentations,
according to Mark, is also giving future generations documents that are often
incomprehensible, without explanatory text. Web: http://slate.msn.com/id/2083920/
The
editors Meredith Quinn and Andrew L. Urban, in Edge of the Unknown World:
the Australian Television and Radio School: Impressions of the first 25 Years,
suggest that assumptions about black holes are not so straightforward:
“In compiling this book, the editors were dependent on the School’s formal
and informal archiving practice. The incomparable Ruth Saunders was a superb
source of material. Having a library background she follows the ‘fifty year
rule’ and has been keeping her own files of interesting titbits since she
began at the AFTRS in 1978. The school’s library was also invaluable. It was
from these two sources that we retrieved the newspaper clippings and many of
the memos and newsletter items reproduced on the following pages…We had less
luck with the official files. Compiling a complete list of all graduates of
the School was a form of hard and tortuous labour. After 1993, comprehensive
data was kept, but for 1988-1993, there was only a semblance of order in
record-keeping. The reliability and thoroughness of data maintained prior to
computerisation was a sad and sorry thing. This was true of many of the
records, not just student records. The appendixes of this book are a tribute
to the fortitude and tenacity of those responsible for compiling them.”
Computerisation, in this case, may have rectified a problem. And it
points to the value of tacit information in a world still struggling to be
convinced about the theory of knowledge management.
All
the reason to look forward to the work of Ross Harvey and Anne Lloyd in
compiling a list of Australia's Lost Documentary Heritage for the Australian
Memory of the World project. (See Cross Currents no 11).
Web: http://www.amw.org.au
The
Information Commons, managed by the American Library Association's Office for
Information Technology Policy, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation,
has launched a weblog featuring news, commentary, and discussion on the
information commons in theory and practice. Topics to be addressed
include intellectual property, public interest, open source, free speech,
networks, commons institutions, and other issues related to access to ideas.
According to the organisers: ‘the weblog format will allow the info-commons
site to become more dynamic. In addition to enabling the Commons to
update information more quickly and easily, the new format also gives new ways
to interact with users, including RSS feeds, email notification, search
facilities and simple user comment forms. Commons-blog will not replace
the info-commons site, but users will find the weblog a handy way to stay
informed about updates to info-commons.org’. Web: info-commons.org and
commons-blog (http://info-commons.org/blog/)
[Source FOS]
The
Sydney Morning Herald 20 May 2003 reflected the views of content management
expert Gerry McGovern and psychologist Les Posen on information overload.
According to McGovern: information overload is a reflection of that almost
genetic historic desire to do more; 70% of the 700 billion pages on the
Internet is unread; wading through today’s information can often result in
poor organization, planning and decision-making. Les Posen underscored the
point: we are not easily able to differentiate between quality material versus
non-quality material. McGovern advocates the following steps to help counter
the information glut: learn to think better; learn to plan better; learn to
research better; learn to collaborate and network with people better; and
learn to create better content. Source: SMH. Web: http://www.smh.com.au/
Australian
digital access prototype
The
National Library of Australia’s Debbie Campbell presented a paper Culturing
a Pearl at Educause in Australasia, 2003 on efforts to find better ways to
provide users with access to that library's digital resources. A resource
discovery service prototype has been developed, with the goal of delivering
services through collaborative efforts between cultural and academic agencies.
The prototype identifies several key areas for successful delivery, including
interoperability, trust, and the harmonisation of technology, descriptive
standards and practice. One challenging issue, according to Campbell, is
resolving ways for non-academic researchers to find their way into the
National Library's resources via consumer-market search engines such as Google.
She suggests that this can be accomplished if specialised services form a
relationship with search engines so that ‘searchers find the best examples
of Australiana, not just something that will suffice on the day or in the hour
spent searching’. Web: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/dcampbell1.html
[Source: ShelfLife]
Subject
Portals Project
The
Resource Discovery Network (RDN) in the United Kingdom will take over
responsibility for portal functions within their existing services when the
Subject Portals Project (SSP) concludes as a project in August 2003. The RDN
is a collaboration of more than 70 educational and research organizations in
the United Kingdom, which coordinates access to specialist information
resources in partner institutions, including the Natural History Museum and
the British Library. The Subject Portals Project (SPP) has developed modular
plug-in ‘portlet’ functions for existing RDN subject hubs - such as Biome
(biomedical), Humbul (humanities) and Sosig (social sciences) – to integrate
into their own services. Functions include: a cross-search of information
resources from multiple publishers; an alerting service; an aggregated
newsfeed; and various additional services, such as an e-journal search engine
and jobs listings. See Turning Gateways into Portals by Ruth Martin,
June 2003 issue of the
CILIP Library Update. Web: http://www.cilip.org.uk/
CYCLADES
CYCLADES
is a European Commission IST Programme R&D software project to support
searching and managing electronic documents from a large number of digital
libraries using the following features: (1) harvest-based information
gathering, plus indexing and storage of gathered information in a local
database; (2) mechanisms for dynamically structuring the overall information
space into meaningful collections; (3) search and browse functionality to
support the users in formulating queries and develops plans for their
evaluation; (4) capacity to support information filtering on the basis of
implicitly acquired individual user profiles, and profiles of the working
communities the user belongs to; (5) ability to provide recommendations about
new published articles within a working community, recommendation of users,
collections and communities; (6) ability to support collaboration between
members of communities and project groups by providing functionality for
creating shared working spaces referencing users' own documents, collections,
recommendations, related links, textual annotations, ratings, etc. Web: http://www.ercim.org/cyclades/
[Source: FOS].
Net Snippets
A US
company, 4Developers, has produced a personal organiser called Net Snippets.
This integrates with Internet Explorer in a Windows environment and can be
used to organise Web resources and desktop applications by dropping and
dragging them into user-organised files.
Brandeis University and Bentley College, after obtaining site licenses,
will develop a link between Ex Libris software and Net Snippets to enable a
user of SFX and MetaLib to instantly add any retrieved resource into the Net
Snippets organising environment. Web: www.netsnippets.com.
[Source: American Libraries Online May 2003 via Shelf life via FOS]
OpenURL
Standard
The
National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released for trial use
the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services standard (version 1.0).
The standard allows a user who has retrieved an information resource citation
to obtain immediate access to the most appropriate copy of the full resource
through the implementation of extended linking services. The selection of the
best source for the full resource is based on the user's and the
organization's preferences on location, cost, and contractual or license
agreements with information suppliers, among other issues.
This is accomplished by storing context sensitive metadata with the
OpenURL link from the source citation and linking it to a resolver server
where the preference information and links to the source material are stored.
The initial development of OpenURL targeted electronic delivery of scholarly
journal articles. In version 1.0 of the standard the framework is generalised
to enable communities beyond the original audience of scholarly information
users to adopt extended linking services and to lower the entry barrier for
new implementers. The
California Digital Library is coordinating the trial by an
international group comprising data providers constructing OpenURL metadata,
providers of OpenURL resolvers, and libraries providing end user services
using OpenURL resolution. Webs: t http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Public_Comments.htm.
NISO Web: http://www.niso.org. [Source NISO
via FOS]
Preservation
Metadata
OCLC
& RLG have formed PREMIS, a working group to explore preservation metadata
implementation strategies. Over the next year the 20-member working group will
develop a
set of core preservation metadata elements and a data dictionary to
support them. It will also (a) evaluate strategies for managing preservation
metadata within a digital preservation system, and for the exchange of
preservation metadata between systems; (b) establish pilot programs for
testing the group's recommendations and best practices in a variety of systems
settings; and (c) explore opportunities for the cooperative creation and
sharing of preservation metadata. The results of the group's activities will
be made available for public review and comment. Web: http://www.oclc.org/research/pmwg/
[Source: FOS].
Web Mining
Connotate
Technologies has released Web Mining Server 4.0, which uses information agents
to monitor, harvest, mine, aggregate and integrate Web information. Web Mining
Server automatically navigates content, extracts what's important and converts
it from HTML to various formats including XML, alerts, database records, Excel
spreadsheets and documents. Web: http://www.connotate.com
[Source: KMWorld]
XML for archives
The
National Archives of Australia is developing an approach to the preservation
of digital records using XML. This involves converting records in proprietary
data formats to equivalent data formats in XML, using a software application
devised by the Archives. The Archives has developed a number of XML data
formats for converting the digital records it receives from Australian federal
government agencies. Theses are available through: http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/preservation/digital/xml_data_formats
html.
This
issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul Bentley
The
Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback
on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..
